AiBU to defend History teachers

[Wbeezer]

My social media feed is full of posts announcing surveys and petitions asking for improvement to UK history teaching in schools to include more info on slavery, racism, colonialism etc. Undoubtedly a good idea. The posts in reply are making me feel sorry for teachers because :

1. There is no such thing as a UK curriculum or exam syllabus, never has been.

2.I'm only familiar with my local history syllabus and it already has many topic areas that cover problematic British history, at least at high school level. Many of the improvements people are demanding have already happened.

3.you cant base opinions on experiences that are decades out of date. Yes learning lists of kings and Queens was boring and irrelevant but is scarcely taught now!. My DS is a current History student, he had to teach himself about King's and Queens by Reading Horrible Histories books to fill in some blanks before he went to uni as his overview of history timelines was a bit lacking. This was because he spent so much time studying interesting social and political history and learning how to analyse historical context etc.

4.i learnt about slavery and racism from the TV, in the 1970s, education doesn't just happen in schools. I'd argue that quality film and TV is more likely to reach people of all ages, more quickly.

History was one of my favourite subjects at school. When I went to university part of my degree was taught by a history professor, he stayed his political stance from the offset and told us that the way he taught history would be shaded by his political viewpoint. I'll always remember that.
Also history is written by the victor.
There are 2 sides to every story. This needs to be considered with every historical event.
My grandma lived through ww2 and spoke about the war from her own, real perspective. I've always found this far more beneficial than reading a book about it. Her account was true and told from her own reality. She spoke about the real Winston Churchill and how he told the army to shoot members of her family who dared to go on strike. My great uncle recounted merely watching a fracas between the police and striking miners and recalled how a mounted police officer struck him across the head causing his head to be cut open, then told him to mind his own business and go home. My mum told me that the local hospital, name after a local land owner, was in fact paid for entirely by miners and not the landowner as other historians would have you believe.

Black Histiry Month was introduced, first in USA for exactly that reason some pps have mentioned, to focus on the achievements of pioneering black people who have been excluded from mainstream teachings. That it is necessary to introduce it is of course very telling.

@milveycrohn it was me that mentioned 18 century trade and this particular ships captain traded across the Atlantic and became extremely rich, there are other clues to links with slavery, at the very least trading with plantations in the Caribbean. Of course the school was supposed to educated local poor children but now only teaches children of the well off...

I think the lack of official curriculum is still the problem. Teachers (and HODs) are still basically teaching what they want to teach. Even at GCSE level, there are lots of options so teachers can still choose their favourites. It all leaves some pupils with pretty big gaps in their knowledge.

At my son's school, he had the HOD for History for 4 out of the 5 years. The HOD was clearly into war etc. Years 1 to 3 were the Crusades, Roses, Henry and the Catholics, English Civil Wars, Princes in the tower, Armada, etc.

No social nor economic history at all, nothing at all about America, Africa, Russia, etc. Nothing about the British industrial revolution. Not even the French Revolution (which I suffered for a year when I was at school).

At GCSE, DS had to study "warfare through the ages", "middle east conflict", "richard and john" and another war module I can't remember.

It's just not healthy for teens to spend 4 out of 4 years on nothing but war and conflict, especially when it's all UK related.

Nothing about ancient history at all such a shame

I agree that's a big part of history that's completely ignored. All the empires (Roman, Egyptian, Aztec, Russian) were so important and influential but just never mentioned at all.

See I think you do get some ancient history in the Classics. I taught Classics to yr 7/8/9 and we covered a lot of Sumer, Mesopotamia, cuneiform, ziggurats, early trade routes, early empires.

I think we even touched on Ethiopian history briefly (would love to cover more).

As a body of knowledge it is recognised but I think it is visited briefly at primary school (Greece, Sparta, Rome) and that’s it.

The Irish history curriculum covers Ancient Ireland well, I thought. They talk about the monuments still in existence and use a lot of practical archaeology to merge active learning to school age children (archaeologists demonstrate mini digs in museums, etc).

I also remember, as a child, attending a 6 week workshop on Saturdays at the Horniman Museum. They would have artefacts and resources and films from the British Museum. Great stuff.

It's so vast though, we can't hope to educate everyone in everything and I agree with a pp who said that museums, libraries etc all have a role to play in educating us all about important topics.

Revisiting the thread also reminds me I know three history grads. One ancient history (nothing before dates), one American history and one Classics. Only one of them covered American slavery in their degree but no-one's blaming their professors for that...

My point is that successful delivery of all this requires in school and out of school organisations. Zoos, museums, etc are learning places that can extend out from schools. Isn’t the Natural History museum Imperials repository? It’s their space for students and professors to study and examine the artefacts they have primarily - it was just extended to the public over the years.

There are so many learning opportunities - statues, art works, plaques, local libraries but some how our focus is on just one channel of distribution (school) when it’s all around us.

I’ve just thought of the literary figures all over Dublin. You can sit with Oscar Wilde on the green, Behan on the Grand Canal?, Joyce, etc all over the city.

Plus Phil Lynette (musical history) and characters from Irish mythology Anna Livia?and Molly Malone (popular song).

It’s all history and they make great starting points but we ignore statues so much.

Phil Lynott.

somehow our focus is on just one channel of distribution (school) when it’s all around us.
I've been vaguely noticing this tendency for all public services aimed at both learning and children to become focused on schools for a while. Slightly off-topic, but it's interesting to have someone else thinking that. They are the only institutions that are still deemed worthy of funding, and now have to do a bit of everything. It's not good for the school staff who have to volunteer for all these extra activities or take on all these extra responsibilities (think social services too): it's not good for kids, who could grow up thinking that there is nothing outside schools: it's not good for the economies.

Local history is a favourite topic of mine, referring as well back to @emilybrontescorsett. It was a program on local history that first got me hooked on it, being able to walk around my local area and trace local stories. It makes it more real, creates personal connections, and enable you to see the past as whole worlds in their own contexts not just lists of dates and achievements. The history of a nation is the collective history of each and every local area and that very definitely includes memories.
Unfortunately with the death of libraries, which were the main collectors and repositories of local history records (assuming someone in the library had had some interest and enough influence to push it), no one is really defending this area now. I just googled and it looks like the Uni of Leicester's local history dept is still in existence, but it certainly must be slipping down official priorities and radars.

I think one of the issues is that racial aspects of history are often taught as 'foreign issues'. The slave trade/ racism is an 'American issue' etc

The reality is that many British cities are built on Slave money and racism is endemic in our culture.

I studied history but I only learned that the British army invented concentration camps for black people in the Boer war, when I was an adult.

And it's only as an adult that I explored partition and the vile role of colonialism in India, especially during WW2 where mass famine was inflicted

Or the opium wars where Britain stole land from China by selling them drugs (and then wonders years later why that relationship is tinged with suspicion)

Not to mention sectarianism/the Troubles etc.

I did however learn about agricultural development, the Roman Empire and the Tudors. None of which gave a bearing on my daily life...

@Pepperwort, you will be glad to know that in the national curriculum (for England), local history is an essential topic for study at key stages 1, 2 and 3.

I'd be happier with the current demand for history teaching about racism and slavery being put in historical contexts, and ensuring that it is not just about making (quite possibly disadvantaged) people feel guilty, or resentful at being told to feel guilty, about existing now. As pp's were asking earlier, how far and what moral lessons should be drawn? Not to downplay or justify the horrors of the British Empire, but they were not the first people to collect groups of people and keep them under armed guards. There have been imperialists before, and many more varied cultures living cheek-by-jowl in the past, e.g. in Greece. Conflicts, genocide and famine are not new, and have been visited on the English themselves in the past. As far as I know, racism looks like a British empire invention, but not discrimination based on cultures - cultures will want to keep their own customs after all.

What we could perhaps get out of all that more profitably is discussions about the behaviours of imperialism generally, human tendencies to default to empire-building, cyclical history - and how to deal with different cultures with different customs, possible alternative experiments. Or I could be using that to further my viewpoints.

As one who was at school in the 70s my question is when did they stop teaching about the slave trade. I can still remember how the triangular trade worked simply because of what I learnt at school.

I haven't read all the replies.
I'm white, I'm British, 40 something.
We never learned anything about colonialism or the slave trade at school.
I fully believe we should have done.
It's only as an adult with the internet at ,my fingertips that I've done so, and learned about it.
Children should do too.
In my experience it's not even touched upon.
It should be.

@MrFaceyRomford

As one who was at school in the 70s my question is when did they stop teaching about the slave trade. I can still remember how the triangular trade worked simply because of what I learnt at school.

Individual schools are different... But we cover the trade triangle, slavery, industrial revolution and British Empire in Y8.

In Year 9 I teach about the treatment of minorities...Suffragettes, Black, Hispanic and Native American rights of the 1950s &60s. I also teach Nazi Germany, Holocaust and genocide looking at Rwanda, and other places as examples.

We also cover French Revolution to reassure a pp. So we do cover a broad range of issues.

I had a prof. at uni. He was very interesting - his theory was that history is taught in the wrong direction. We should start with "where are we now" and work backwards to learn how we got here! I didn't study history, but I found his point of view not entirely wrong.

That's ^ exactly the bias I was taught to avoid in history. Never look for the present in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if he was hoping for someone to argue about it.

@BlessYourCottonSocks
In Year 9 I teach about the treatment of minorities...Suffragettes, Black, Hispanic and Native American rights of the 1950s &60s. I also teach Nazi Germany, Holocaust and genocide looking at Rwanda, and other places as examples.

I think this proves my point nicely - all of these examples (with the exception of the suffragettes who were 'successful') are non-British examples. It perpetuates the myth that the British Empire was some benign improvement strategy and that we are not still living with the consequences of institutional racism and oppression today

Why not teach those subjects using some of these examples (then perhaps almost half of the UK population may not think colonialism and oppression 'a good thing'):
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atrocities-british-empire-amritsar-boer-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html#gsc.tab=0

For people saying about the teaching of some Irish history in the UK - one of the topics in my late 90s GCSE was about Northern Ireland from partition to modern day (and was being taught to use just the Good Friday agreement was happening)

Topics then were selected from a list offered by the exam boards?

I suspect a lot of the 'we didn't do that' was more a case of

'We did it, I didn't pay attention and pissed around in lessons, so now can't remember the teacher trying to teach us it because it was 20 years ago'.

I’ve always taught about the slave trade in conjunction with the birth of jazz and blues in the US (as a music teacher). I always make sure I share information about performers like Bessie Smith and talk about the way she was treated and how that was reflected in her music. We also learn about the huge contribution of black artists to the creation of what we call ‘pop’ nowadays.

I asked my dd who left school 5 years ago and did up to History A-level. She says the books used and the actual curriculum were very much geared towards British colonialism benevolent, slavery a foreign issue, Winston Churchill bulwark against foreign racism, atrocities happened elsewhere, but that she had a brilliant history teacher who always tried to put the record straight.

A pp suggested that we should go careful on teaching the atrocities of British colonialism and must put it in the context of "worse things happened elsewhere". Is this how we approach atrocities perpetrated elsewhere in the world?

-Well, you might think the Stalinist purges were bad, but actually, other people did just as bad things, so you have to see it in this context and make sure you don't condemn it.

Of course we don't. We don't excuse American slavery, or Stalinist purges, or the Holocaust on the lines that other people have been horrible too. We teach them. We make sure children know about them. And that is how we need to approach the British colonial past too. These things happened. We are not making excuses, we are making sure you have the information.